She noted public health officials have been fighting for funding for the past decade. “They are still having to fight for funding every year, and this is why we are in the predicament we are in right now, because our health care system is so fragmented, and our public health funding is so bad,” she said.

She hopes financial advisors are taking notice and will rethink their strategies with clients. Financial planners, she said, spends too much time predicting a future that is not predictable and not enough time creating resiliency for their clients so that they can withstand the impact of troubled times.

“We give people these projections about retirement and we try to predict the economy. That’s bull. Instead, we need to be helping people create a great life,” she said.

She said the focus in her practice revolves around making sure people are saving for the future with an emphasis on resiliency, not retirement. She pointed out that retirement was invented in the 1930s with Social Security at a time when the average life expectancy for U.S. residents was under 65.

“Now we live another 20 to 30 years past that, and so to me people shouldn’t be quitting work at 65. And this goes into public policy because there is so much ageism," she argues. "We need to create policies to keep people working as long as possible, doing something, because that’s your greatest way to maintain financial security."

If you are able to save a lot of money and it is much less than you spend, then you can give up the ability to work, she said. But she cautions people not to count on the stock market to take care of them for 30 years. “And this [latest bear market] is a perfect example,” she said of the pandemic.  

McClanahan also faults financial advisors for allowing clients to be too aggressive with their investments in retirement. “You can’t afford to take that kind of risk if you are no longer working. If you have a lot of money, yes, but if you have just enough, you have to be really careful with that,” she said.

At her firm, clients who are in retirement or near retirement have at least five years of cash flow and most of them have no more than 30% to 40% stock in their portfolio, she said. “It’s making certain that if the bottom drops out that your clients know that they are OK in the short term, and ideally the market will come back in the long term,” she said.

Financial advisors, she said, should prepare their clients for hard times and make sure they have an emergency fund that helps to provide for cash flow that’s going to meet their needs no matter what the market is doing. They also need to be appropriately insured, have all their estate planning documents up to date and have a good financial plan, she said.

“If you look at the Great Depression, it took 20 years for the stock market to come back. So, never let people take more risk than they can afford financially to meet their needs,” she said.   

Today, McClanahan focuses on family medicine as a volunteer and continues to offer financial advice to clients. She said she's commited to continuing the fight for public health funding. “We should be creating resiliency within our systems instead of panicking when something big occurs,” she said. 

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